I started my dive into Let's Play around 2010, but in reality, my first exposure to the niche was in 2008 when I looked up "Super Mario RPG" and found FlamingRuby's playthrough of it. There was no commentary, it was probably edited in Pinnacle Studio since the Dazzle was the only affordable way to record gameplay back in the day. Suffice it to say, a lot has changed in content creation since then, namely the complete adoption of 16:9 widescreen TVs and the nearly immediate discarding of CRTs once HDTVs became affordable and consumed much less space. I was born with a SNES controller in my hand, so I grew attached to the blocky, square aspect ratio, and going to widescreen was a growing pain when all of your games are designed for an aspect ratio that simply does not exist commonly anymore. The image would always be stretched, and it'd be difficult to change it back at times. [4]
With VTubing, I found myself free to explore the most experimental projects I wanted, and while playing through Dead Rising 2 casually, I started messing around with setting my console resolution to 480p whenever possible and playing in the original 4:3 aspect ratio. Which got me thinking: "What if VTubers existed in 2009, back when 4:3 was the norm?"
Lo and behold, seven months later, I have figured out a simple but effective way to mask UI elements over my model in a way that doesn't obscure any essential on-screen information, text, and so on. This leads me to the current project at hand. Currently in production is a Pikmin 2 Let's Play, rendered at 1920x1440, a 4:3 1440p resolution.[1] The embedded video is a test of how the editing looks at 480p, which is still a work in progress. The intent is to release these videos in 1440p for YouTube in order to get past their strange bitrate limitations at lower qualities. The result is hopefully one of the first examples of a VTuber you can watch on a tube TV, and that's almost exclusively who these videos are for: People that still own or collect CRTs, either as an enthusiast, or those who wax nostalgic, like myself.
However, it's more than just a novelty project for me. It's also the project that I always wanted to do. For all three of these games, I found myself obsessing and researching about them, to the point where I felt like I knew almost too much about how the game works. Parasite Eve in particular uses a guide made in 2006, which details just about everything in the game quite accurately. Masking out UI elements and text is much simpler, but making it look good at any quality is the real challenge. [2]
I use DaVinci Resolve 18's free version for all of my editing since losing my previous computer, and coming from Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 to DaVinci was like night and day. [3] I could more accurately mask the gameplay, and more importantly, easily render the project in the final 1440p resolution, as well as test at lower resolutions and lower bitrates, much faster.
Oh yeah, and I should explain the 1440p part, because no GameCube, PS1, or Xbox 360 game should be able to output in 1440p, and they can't. I use a YPbPr (Component) to HDMI converter, which does output in 4:3, but upscales the 480p output to 1080p, albeit with progressive scanlines. (I'm merely hoping those don't show up as easily when watching at 480p.) The first attempt at this format (with Dead Rising 2) was done without separating the model from the gameplay, which is why the overlay doesn't look quite right. For Parasite Eve and Pikmin 2, however, I record on a 2560x1920 canvas (still 4:3), then rescale and fit them on a 1920x1440 Timeline in DaVinci. [4] It doesn't seem like it takes a lot of effort, but it took a lot of experimentation to only need one file for three video tracks and two audio tracks, and I'm still improving the workflow as I continue chipping away at the project.
My hope is to get the Pikmin 2 series done ideally before the end of July, but at the very least, the end of summer. The Parasite Eve series should hopefully release on December 24th to coincide with the in-game timeline, and Dead Rising 2 is currently the most complicated of the three and probably won't be ready until we're well into 2024, unless I suddenly explode out of the gate with production. I'm extremely happy and proud of the progress that's been made in regards to this little silly passion project of mine, but I'm only just getting started and have a lot of work to do, so I'm going to get back to it.